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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Franco Iacomella — WordPress.com starts taking payment in Bitcoin

Beginning today, users around the world will be able to pay with Bitcoin — the unregulated, decentralized digital currency built on public-key cryptography. Explaining its decision, the company noted that PayPal currently blocks access from over 60 countries, and that many credit card companies have similar restrictions, whether because of politics, fraud, or other reasons.

WordPress.com says that its Bitcoin payments will be handled by BitPay.com and that there is no need to wait for confirmation since the transaction risk is “already acceptably low.” And while Bitcoin famously doesn’t permit refunds (because of the possibility for fraud), WordPress says it will still honor its refund policy, working with BitPay to get unhappy customers their money back.

Clarification: It’s WordPress.com, the web hosting service run by Automattic, and not the free WordPress software platform that underpins it, that has begun taking payment in Bitcoin.

2 comments:

Bitcoin is a fraud and a Ponzi scheme run by geeks looking to out-hustle each other. They are dumber than the gold bugs. Watching these so-called monetary populists engaging in currency speculation gambits, and slavishly glomming onto a currency based on hard-coded monetary policy devised by programmers more secretive than the most secretive of authoritarian central bankers, with some coins mysteriously issued to people in the network, apparently as pure rent, is a laugh. I can't wait until the whole thing goes belly up.